Lame Excuse for Welfare: Bogus Food Stamp Challenge

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In a letter today in the Washington Post, Maryland food stamp bureaucrat Kevin McGuire tried to justify more spending on food stamps (and his own job) by making misleading claims. (Maryland's liberal government recently raised taxes to pay for more welfare and public employee salaries.) McGuire put himself on the "Food Stamp Challenge," a deceptive exercise in which participants deliberately live on less than any actual food stamp recipient has to spend on food. Participants live entirely "on an average food stamp benefit," even though it's just part of the food budget of the people who actually receive it. The "average" benefit is given to people who have income of their own to spend; it is less than the maximum food stamp benefit, which is what people with little other income to spend on food receive.

Similarly, back when I was single, I ate a well-balanced diet while spending far less over the long term than the "average food stamp benefit." I ate lots of potatoes (which are cheap and nutritious, more so than the pasta McGuire ate, which, unlike potatoes, contains no vitamin C and few minerals), plenty of cheap canned fish and vegetables bought in bulk (I bought 500 cans of tuna, an excellent source of protein, on sale for 20 cents each, and filled my small car with them), plus milk, bananas, and carrots. My wife, when she first immigrated to America, managed to eat plenty of nutritious vegetables while living on a salary of less than $1200 per month, and spending less than food stamp recipients do on food (even though she lived in one of those predominantly-minority urban areas -- southwest Washington, D.C. -- where welfare advocates claim it's hard for residents to find cheap, nutritious food).

The farm bill will increase, rather than reduce, world hunger. The costly subsidies for U.S. cotton farmers contained in the bill undermine the livelihoods of poor cotton farmers in African countries like Burkina Faso, by artificially destroying the market for their product. In the absence of subsidized competition, those African farmers would be able to compete in the global marketplace, owing to their low production costs. The farm bill also contains many provisions that damage the environment.